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Sunday, July 29, 2012

In the interest of fairness, here's some information about that famous Mitt Romney line. The context is not always reported, but PolitiFact has it:

Romney was specifically talking about the ability to get rid of your
health insurance provider when you aren’t satisfied with its services.

"I want individuals to have their own insurance," Romney said. "That
means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy.
It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like
being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if
someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m
going to go get someone else to provide that service to me."

So Romney wasn't referring to his work at Bain Capital -- or to the
more general question of serving as a boss who has decided to fire
employees of his company -- but rather the notion of switching service
providers. He might as well have been talking about switching cellphone
carriers or cable TV companies.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Media company Explore has teamed up with Alaska's Katmai National Park to install webcams that will deliver live video feeds of brown bears catching salmon in a popular feeding ground.

Each year, around a hundred bears travel to a stretch of Brooks River to fill their bellies with salmon. Now anyone with an internet connection can witness this gathering thanks to four high-definition cameras that have been set up in this remote part of Alaska.

One camera is positioned at Brook Falls, where the larger male bears fight it out for salmon that are desperately trying to leap their way upstream.

Compare that to this 1980 Reagan campaign commercial to see how far we've progressed in our tolerance for bears (right?):

Yesterday, I watched as two bears postured somewhat violently towards one another. Meanwhile, a nearby bear was dining on salmon. This demonstrated that the two in the foreground learned nothing from the 2012 Republican primaries.

Central to the secret knowledge of property law is the recognition that
property rests on the state. Most of the land that white America first
lived on had to be expropriated—whether purchased or taken more or less
violently—from Native America. Expropriation required an active and
militarized state. To know what one owned, to be recognized as a
legitimate possessor of property, relied on a series of steps usually
including the payment of taxes and the recording of title in the county
records office. Ownership usually involved the protection of the local
police, and sometimes the state militia or the army. Even when a
property owner exercised what property law calls “self-help”—for
example, by evicting a tenant, pulling a gun on a trespasser or hiring
Pinkertons—he or she knew (or should have known) that it was necessary
to follow the rules of self-help set out by the state; otherwise,
legitimate self-help would be redefined as criminal violence. Over the
course of the past two centuries, the realm of legitimate self-help has
dramatically narrowed. Meanwhile, throughout the twentieth century, the
value and use of what one held increasingly depended on engagement with
zoning boards and a variety of regulatory agencies.

The presence of the state is pervasive throughout Banner’s narrative.
There is no period in American history that lies “before” regulation or
public vexations. Private property has always found its origins, its
recognition and its security in the largesse of the state, even as much
of the sentimental claptrap that passes for historical understanding
continues to deny that truth.

Obviously, the section at least indirectly speaks to some of the key issues in the current trumped up controversy being stirred by the Romney presidential campaign. As I discussed a few days ago, President Obama's "you didn't build that" remark, in context, was clearly referencing the underlying social contract.

As Banner and Hartog emphasize, every bit of private property in the U.S., even a private business, is deeply embedded in the power of the state.

Incidentally, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama largely agree about the government's role in promoting business, as Jon Stewart's The Daily Show has been illustrating the last couple of nights. This quote used by Stewart tonight is taken here from Think Progress:

ROMNEY: I know that you recognize a lot of people help you in a business. Perhaps the bank, the investors. There is no question your mom and dad, your school teachers. The people who provide roads, the fire, the police. A lot of people help.

Compare the highlighted text (from Think Progress) to the Obama speech I quoted the other day.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

By now, these lines from Barack Obama have been burned into the 24/7 news cycle by the American right: "If
you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that
happen." Mitt Romney on the campaign trail and Fox News in its programming (presuming you see a difference) have apparently been using it relentlessly.

I’m not going to see us gut the investments that grow our economy to
give tax breaks to me or Mr. Romney or folks who don’t need them. So
I’m going to reduce the deficit in a balanced way. We’ve already made a
trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make another trillion or
trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little
bit more. (Applause.) And, by the way, we’ve tried that before -- a
guy named Bill Clinton did it. We created 23 million new jobs, turned a
deficit into a surplus, and rich people did just fine. We created a
lot of millionaires.

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me
-- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t --
look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You
didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think,
well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart
people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody
else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of
hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some
help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody
helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that
allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If
you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that
happen.The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government
research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money
off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our
individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There
are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I
mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a
hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you
know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we
funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how
we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we
invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise
or fall together as one nation and as one people

Typical socialist, eh? He's talking about how government can promote free enterprise to grow the economy for everyone. Not exactly how Marx and Lenin mapped the future.

As others have noted, these words from Obama echo those of Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (starting about 0:50):

Thursday, July 05, 2012

As I've sometimes mentioned, I've been serving on the University's Sustainability Council for some years. Throughout that time, the group has often discussed the prospects for influencing behavioral change in the students, staff, faculty and administrators.

The June 2012 Atlantic Monthly had a piece by David H. Freedman about "Skinnerian" behavior modification. Freedman demonstrates that psychologist B.F. Skinner's ideas have earned a bad reputation over the years, but they potentially offer a good deal for the modern world. Many people fail to understand that "Skinner sought to shape only consciously chosen, directly observable behavior, and only with rewards."

Readers of this blog might want to check out the lengthy article as it is filled with interesting anecdotes and explanation.

I found the following paragraphs to be especially useful as they suggest practical application of Skinnerian thinking to address contemporary problems related to sustainability and health:

At Palo Alto’s storied University Coffee Cafe, I recently found myself
sitting next to a young fellow named Yoav Lurie, who turned out to be
running a Boulder-based company called Simple Energy, which uses
Facebook as a social-reinforcement tool for conserving energy by
tracking, sharing, and reinforcing certain behaviors. The product, like
many of its competitors in the booming field of energy-related apps, is
sponsored by large utility companies incentivized to reduce their
reliance on conventional power sources.

Government agencies are in a similar position to benefit. I was speaking
with a manager at the U.S. Department of Transportation about public
transit when he mentioned that the agency is testing an app that
provides local travelers with various transportation options for
specific trips and that could gently reinforce decisions to use public
transit by pointing out the extra calories commuters would burn by
walking to the station and the carbon they’d avoid emitting by leaving
their cars at home.

Once we reconvene, I'll bring this to the attention of some others on the Council.

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

I do not really study American politics and lobbying, but this tidbit from a year- old Time magazine (June 20, 2011) recently caught my attention:

...the fossil-fuel industries are lobbying
Congress hard to block any legislation that would impose federal
standards for renewable energy or diminish their special status. This
includes $5.5 billion each year in tax breaks and discounted royalty
payments as a result of $200 million in lobbying and political
contributions. By contrast, the clean-energy lobby, which includes wind
and solar, spent $30.7 million in 2010.

Wind energy, which currently makes up just 2.4% of the U.S. energy grid, has received some fairly significant subsidies in recent years. Indeed, earlier in the article, the journalist pointed out that Spanish energy company "Iberdrola received over $1 billion in cash grants from the U.S. Treasury" as part of the Obama stimulus plan.

According to the National Journal, the renewable energy industry received in total about $7 billion in "tax credits and grants for energy from solar, wind, geothermal, and ethanol." Those have now mostly expired, I think.

Unfortunately, green energy subsidies have not been popular in the new "tea party" Congress, partly as a result of the half billion lost in the Solyndra deal. As the NY Times reported in late January:

As of early this year, the cash-grant program, known as the 1603
program, had awarded $1.76 billion for more than 22,000 solar projects,
according to the Treasury Department.

The Obama administration supported an extension of a tax credit plan that would have provided another $6.8 billion from 2011-2015. Of course, these policies are being framed around jobs more than the environmental or geopolitical implications:

“Because of federal investments, renewable energy use — sources like
wind and solar — has nearly doubled,” Mr. Obama said at a stop at
Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo., where he promoted the
increasing use of renewable power by the military and repeated a call
for Congress to approve the tax credits. “Thousands of Americans have
jobs because of those efforts.”

One-third of the growth in renewable energy in recent years has been in wind power. Solar has also grown quickly, but it is still relatively expensive in the face of cheap coal. In any case, it would appear that even modest lobbying can be effective if the audience is receptive to the requests. Perhaps the fossil fuel industry spends so much because most politicians realize that the subsidies are bad policy.